Threat Modeling Again, What does STRIDE have to do with threat modeling?

In my last couple of posts, I've talked about the STRIDE categories. As I mentioned, STRIDE provides a convenient classification mechanism for threats, and threat modeling is all about trying to identify the threats to your feature/component/whatever.

When we first started threat modeling, we already had the idea of STRIDE categories, but we really didn't know how to apply them. We'd go into the big threat modeling meeting and look at each of the pieces of our diagram and ask "what is the spoofing (or tampering, or whatever) threat against this component"? We were thinking about the STRIDE categories as discrete elements, not as categories in which to collect threats.

After a while, it became obvious that not only doesn't this work (again, it's very adhoc), but it's missing the point. The point is to identify the threats and put them in the appropriate bucket so you can help to understand how to mitigate the threat.

One of the interesting aspects of threats is that they are permanent. For a given design, the threats against that design are static, for any data flow diagram, you have a static set of threats that apply to that data flow diagram. There may be more than one threat in a particular category for a particular element, but every element is subject to certain threats.

Once we had this mindset shift, we started thinking about how the STRIDE categories applied to various elements, and we came to an interesting realization.

It turns out that some STRIDE threats only apply to particular types of elements. If you think about it, it makes sense - for instance, an Elevation of Privilege threat doesn't apply to data stores (since a data store simply holds data, it operates at no privilege level).

Remember that we consider four types of elements in a threat model: External Entities, Processes, Data Stores and Data Flows. For each element type, the following threats are considered valid:

External Entities: Spoofing, Repudiation. Since an external entity could be anything, including the human being interacting with the component, Tampering, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service and Elevation of Privilege threats don't really make sense). On the other hand, you can absolutely spoof a human being, and human beings can repudiate operations.

Processes: Processes are subject to all of the STRIDE threats (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege).

Repudiation threats against data stores require special mention. Data stores often come under attack to allow for a repudiation attack to work (if you have a log located in a data store, the attacker might try to flood the data store with log entries to enable a repudiation attack. In addition, logs held in data stores are almost always the mitigation against a repudiation threat.

And with that final realization, all the pieces have been brought together to describe Microsoft's current methodology for threat modeling, which we call STRIDE-per-element.

Regarding "Data Stores", it’s fairly common for database applications to also store the "right assignment" for users into tables. Doesn’t exploiting it be possible for "Elevation of Privilege"?

For example, the user information of MySQL is stored in the database named "mysql". If someone find their way to modify "mysql.user" table then execute "flush privileges" or just wait until the next time the server is restarted, the attacker can gain access to all databases – not just the database that the buggy application runs on – and can feel free to drop any of them.